Jack Straw will apparently be introducing legislation in the next few weeks that aims to strip any life peer convicted of a criminal offence of their seat in the House of Lords. Such a bill has been mooted ever since Jeffrey Archer was jailed in 2001, while meaningful reform has been on the cards for the best part of a century – therefore this really is too little too late. Straw's predecessor as secretary of state for justice, Lord Falconer, promised that Lords reform would be a priority of Labour in its third term. Straw's greatest achievement has been to kick Lords reform into the long grass – despite securing an historic vote in the House of Commons calling for a fully elected chamber.

It's all a pretty sorry state of affairs. The truth, whisper it, is that the current semi-reformed Lords suits the government very well indeed. Oh, it occasionally votes down government legislation, but this happens much more occasionally than you might think thanks to the Conservative peers' shockingly low attendance records. The current system lets the prime minister make whoever he likes a minister and he can always offer a place on the red benches to any errant backbencher in need of "retirement". Even the post-1997 convention of making appointments to the Lords vaguely proportional to the last general election was quietly dumped in 2005. It is no wonder that actual reform never quite seems to arrive.

How do they get away with this? Quite simply, because we let them. At a time when the reputation of politics is at an all time low, it has become fashionable to either claim we have, by accident, managed to come up with the most perfect system ever (and one which will magically remain this way for ever more), or to come up with a weird and wacky reform of your own – anything that doesn't involve an actual election with ghastly politicians.

So it is that we hear talk of the legendary "independent" nature of the current House of Lords and how elections would threaten this by imposing a party whip on members, a view most recently echoed by Henry Porter. The fact that the Lords already has party whips and that Lords vote on party lines more loyally than elected MPs, is an inconvenient truth generally ignored. The role of crossbenchers is also frequently emphasised, despite the fact that their attendance records are so low that they almost never play a decisive role. The reality is that the Lords' strength lies in the fact that no single party has overall control – a feature that most forms of election would preserve.

Meanwhile, Simon Jenkins looks wistfully back to the corporatism of Mussolini's Italy while others look even further back to Athens, and call for the second chamber to be appointed by lottery. This isn't how Athenian democracy worked – it was the one citizen, one vote ekklesia that acted as legislature, not the lottery appointed boule. In its pure form it also only lasted for a few decades, but this is rarely acknowledged by its proponents. Still others have called for an "indirectly elected" second chamber in which the prime minister's power of patronage is replaced by a new power of patronage in the hands of by council leaders.

Our problem is not too much democracy but too little. We would of course be mad to replace the Lords with a duplicate of the House of Commons as it is currently constructed, but the simple solution to that would be to use a proportional electoral system that allowed voters to select individual candidates as well as parties.

The ballot may be desperately unfashionable, but it is the least worst option and the most rigorously tried and tested system for choosing our legislature available. It is high time we embraced it. Until we do, elements of the political establishment will continue to run rings around us.